The Randomness Of Serendipity

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Somehow, even while I was writing yesterday about deep meditation, that my realization about the incremental restriction of oxygen necessary to get me there, made me aware that I was eating meat in the here and now that would sabotage any effort I might make to get there today, even if I decided to practice doing it all morning.

Specifically, I was eating meat that would take my digestive system at least a couple of days to process, and if I eat any more meat before then it'll be even longer. Yesterday, for some reason, I recalled that I was doing a lot of fasting back during the time period I had this astounding, heart-stopping experience of pure bliss.

It happened during my first marriage when I wore a three-piece suit for RCA. I worked an office job and was on the telephone from morning until night. I know that was the situation my situation was in because of where it happened. It happened in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the townhouse apartments we lived at in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I also opened things up in that apartment by taking LSD for the first time there. A lot of "firsts" in my life happened there. It's where I made the decision to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". I left my three-pieced suits there when I ran away from what I knew as home.

My entire life up until that juncture was chaotic and fast-paced by changes. My father, who told me many a story of how he grew up in pretty much the same hearth and home until he married my mother in his early thirties, uprooted his own family time and time again as if that rooted-ness was responsible for this careactor within himself that he called, "Poor Bill".

"Yeah, none of those people I grew up with would believe what happened to Poor Bill. They didn't think I'd make it. But, I did. I did better than all of them put together. Poor Bill, my ass."

Maybe I took my unconscious vow of poverty from my father's attitude of "I'll show 'em!" I guess I decided I'd show 'em too, but what I'd show 'em was that I could do without. I could deliberately be poor and have a more interesting life than they could buy with false ambition.

That hasn't worked out that well. I don't meet too many people who envy me for what I haven't accomplished. Most seem to think they would be a little crazy to have approached life as I have. Not only do they not appear to be jealous of my non-accomplishments, but dismissive of my absurd rationalizations to the contrary. No blame.

I can't live the way I wanna live unless I live alone. Some of the mental states I lust for require uninterrupted processes/rituals that are hard enough to get to from square one initially, much less continuously from the sadness of failure. For that reason I am not particularly fond of visitors.

Some visitors visit because they got nothing going on for themselves at their own home. Everybody is not as trained to amuse themselves as they need to be in order to live alone. They know how to entertain other people just fine, but not themselves. That means they depend on other people being around them to fill the gaps. Group-think. They have picnics, preachings, concerts, art galleries, and wine tastings. Why would they not?

The effort it takes to remain conscious at certain levels of focus is an iffy thang. I've practiced the art of reducing my oxygen intake for years. Practically every night as portal to losing consciousness in order to fully enter the sleep cycles. It's literally, if not virtually impossible to do it laying down. Staying conscious, that is. Once I get oxygen deprived enough to conjure the desired state, I go to sleep.

A body gotta have every advantage it can provide for the experience to be successful. Not having to be concerned with the digestive process because you ate some really spicy pesto is just one of them. Being full of shit because you're constipated is another. Being in a room where you can't ignore somebody else's noise is no good, because it takes at least some focus to ignore it.

Getting into a float tank is an excellent way to get to this place, but it's not a done deal simply to get in there, because that doesn't always guarantee the desired result even though the physical conditions may be optimized. In the end game, however, using a float tank as the only method you got to get there can be cumbersome because float tanks are immobile for the most part.

Since I can't get to this highly desirable state of being in the prone position, because I inevitably go to sleep, and thus lose consciousness, I gotta find an upright position that will give me another shot at consciously experiencing this state of being. Hopefully, to enter it and be able to stay in it for successive times in order to learn to get there without a ritual.

The reason I need to be conscious in this state is to induce repetition and redundancy. I always seem to need a certain degree of rote-ness to get what I need to carry on alone. I don't know whether it's just me or Memorex. I may have set this need up foolishly, but I gotta practice until I find my own needs satisfied or I can't tender an IPO to let the public take their chances with my inventions.

This is probably some freak I need to let go of. Before I stopped consulting the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching I asked it a lot about getting another float tank. The materials I need to build another, mo' bettah sensory deprivation tank, that were missing the first time around, back before the internet evolved, are all over the place, and cheaper. The Emperor's Yellow Book said "No."

Getting that response from the I Ching about building another float tank was a little sad for me. I don't remember whether I asked it if I should avoid using sensory deprivation to help me learn to move, of my own volition, to this state of being I find useful.

One of the most amazing things to do in my dotage is to sit back and contemplate how I ever did something like build my own float tank. I built the bulk of it on the front porch of a beach cottage I rented to stay in while I was working at the duPont plant in construction for Daniels. Then, had to move it here to my house over a hundred miles north.

Getting it here was only a part of the logistical problems I had with this thing. Once I got it here I had to cut a hole in the side of my house to get it inside... and then I usually start thinking about how I ever got this house built to put it in. I might remember hammering every nail, but I don't know how I thought about doing it. It's like my life. No blueprints.
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